A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Revolutionary Mobilization 621

Rhineland. Transport workers who had been put out of work attacked rail­
roads and steamships on the Rhine River, forcing temporary government
concessions.

As in Paris, clubs and workers’ associations began meeting in several Ger­

man cities in March. A Club of Democratic Women and a congress of work­

ers both demanded equal rights for women. The German political theorist

and revolutionary Karl Marx hurried back to the Rhineland from Belgium,

convinced that the revolution he awaited was at hand.

Disturbances broke out in the German countryside. In the Black Forest,

peasants attacked noble manors. In early March, the rural poor defied laws

forbidding them to use royal and noble forests, and now hunted game and

pastured their flocks as they pleased. Some peasants seized and destroyed

old documents that had recorded feudal obligations and forced lords to sign

formal renunciations of old privileges. Outbreaks of violence occurred even

in Brandenburg, where the iron will of the Prussian nobles, the Junkers, had

rarely been tested. Several wary German princes formally relinquished long­

held rights. Armies, militias, and police hesitated to enforce the laws or

obligations that affected the peasantry for fear of sparking a bloody uprising

like the one that took place in Polish Galicia in 1846.

Revolution in Central Europe

There weie relatively few liberals to trouble the sleep of the feeble-minded

Habsburg ruler, Ferdinand I (ruled 1835—1848), who could barely sign his

name to the reactionary decrees put before him. Liberals, most of whom

were Austrians seeking political change or Czechs desiring more rights for

their people, opposed Habsburg autocracy, not Habsburg rule itself. They

wanted constitutional reform, the complete emancipation of the peasantry,

greater efficiency in the administration of Habsburg lands, and, like West­

ern liberals, freedom of the press and expansion of the electoral franchise.

Although Hungary, over which Ferdinand ruled as king, had an even

smaller middle class than Austria, it did have several prominent Hungarian

nobles who espoused liberalism and supported constitutional reform. Their

chief goal, however, was the creation of an independent Hungary. Lajos

Kossuth (1802-1894), a lawyer from a lesser noble family, emerged as the

leader of Hungarian liberals who had been influenced by British and Amer­

ican constitutional liberalism. Whereas some Magyar leaders believed that

Hungary could survive as a nation only within the Austrian monarchy, Kos­

suth saw Hungary’s junior partnership with Austria as an obstacle to liberal

reform and to Magyar nationalism. Most nobles were unwilling, however,

to support reforms that would inevitably undercut their special privileges.

Elsewhere in the Austrian monarchy, small nationalist groups, such as the

Polish Democratic Society, Young Italy, and the Italian Carbonari, also

demanded national independence from Habsburg rule.